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shminux comments on Negative and Positive Selection - Less Wrong
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Ah, I was speaking in terms of finding talented researchers at the graduate and faculty level, not lvy league undergrad admissions. Your comments seem reasonable on the subject of undergrad admissions, which I agree are almost wholly negative selection filters. Do you think this also goes for graduate admissions? What should we anticipate observing if schools were bad at this kind of selection? What would we see if they were good at it?
EDIT: I'm working largely on the observation that getting a PhD in any field is really very easy. The major barrier seems to be interest. This doesn't go for all fields, of course. Law is a serious exception. But physics? Mathematics? I lack data here, but I'm skeptical that these are particularly closed academic fields.
For some definition of easy... As most grad students know, phdcomics is a documentary. The majority of grad students have breakdowns and burnouts as a matter of course. Most (70-75%) still finish, only to never set foot in academia again.
I've never understood this, but I cannot deny that it's true.
Then perhaps there's something about getting a PhD that you don't understand? And, given that, maybe you shouldn't make such sweeping statements about how easy it is?
Perhaps you'd like to enlighten me? Do you understand why PhD students so often burn out? I'm a PhD student, and I don't get it. It's stressful, but not as stressful as a lot of other jobs.
Some things off the top of my head.
Having to be far more independent a researcher than you ever had before.
The standards for your performance have risen similarly.
Projects that don't work, no matter what you do.
Projects that would have worked if you had done them right.
Having to deal with stupid university-political things.
Low pay, with long hours
... while you're listening to the biological clock ticking
... and it's very likely you'll have to move in a few years, so settling down will make things very tricky later on. The '2-body problem' is rough.
Possibility of having your result 'scooped' by someone
... who read your paper in review, held it up with BS, did a quick measurement to reproduce it, then got it published first.
Hah, tru dat. But if that causes people to burn out, then why aren't people burning out in all sorts of professions? Maybe they are, I suppose. And I think it's worth mentioning that most PhD students I've known have never burned out (if by this we mean something practically serious, not just a bout of depression).
People studying to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, and actuaries definitely do burn out from time to time. Very likely, other professions too.
The third and fourth items don't apply so clearly to them, though. You're held responsible for a number of things that you have limited control over, and moreover they are few in number so you can't even use statistics to show how good you are at biasing them towards success with your control.
With a doctor, you see many patients. Some of them will get better. If you NEVER succeed, being a doctor isn't for you. As a researcher, it's quite possible that if your advisor has a risky research plan, then you simply won't succeed just because the objective is unachievable due to unforeseen factors, or the hypothesis is true but it would take a much larger effort than you can pay for to conclusively demonstrate it (who wants to see a P-value of 0.2? It IS suggestive...).
In non-research professions, if you are good at what you do, you will succeed. In research, you must be at least decent to succeed, and being good makes it far more likely... but not certain, or even nearly certain. It takes being really really good to figure out you're going to fail early, get out, and find something else to do.